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The Ethics of Meta-Witnessing in Yannick Haenel's Jan Karski

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The Ethics of Meta-Witnessing in Yannick Haenel's Jan Karski The Ethics of Meta-Witnessing in Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski Helena Duffy Royal Holloway, University of London The research leading to these results has received funding from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) of the European Union’s research and innovation program Horizon 2020, under grant agreement number 654786. This is a Pre-Print of an article published by Taylor & Francis [Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 32.1 (2018)], https://doi.org/10.1080/23256249.2018.1432254. 1 We move now to outside a German wood. Three men are there commanded to dig a hole In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down And be buried alive by the third who is a Pole. Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse. A Lüger settled back deeply in its glove. He was ordered to change places with the Jews. Much causal death had drained away their souls. The thick dirt mounted towards the quivering chin. When only the head was exposed the order came To dig him out again and to get back in. No light, no light in the blue Polish eye. When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth. The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove. He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death. Anthony Hecht, ‘More Light! More Light!’ A ‘false novel’ or a ‘false testimony’? Published in September 2009 as part of Gallimard’s prestigious L’Infini series, Jan Karski narrates the life of Jan Romuald Kozielewski (Karski’s real name), a key figure of the Polish Resistance who during World War II acted as one of the couriers ensuring communication between the Underground and the Polish government in exile, residing first in Paris and then, after the Germans invaded France, in London. Yet, rather than for his perilous missions, one of which ended in Karski’s capture by the Gestapo, the Polish courier is best known for his efforts to persuade the Western Allies to act upon the extermination of the Jews carried out by the Nazis in German-occupied Poland. Indeed, Haenel’s key objective is to pay tribute1 to ‘the man who tried to stop the Holocaust’,2 an ambition confirmed by the fact that all the three parts making up this self-consciously hybrid text speak of Karski’s clandestine visits to the Warsaw Ghetto and the transit camp of Izbica Lubelska. Otherwise the book’s three parts, which greatly vary in length and texture, focus on different stages of Karski’s life and career. Part I offers an ekphratic description of the Polish courier’s testimony in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah (1985) in which he recounts his meeting with two Jewish leaders who entrusted him with the task of communicating the Jews’ tragedy to the world, and his 1 ‘Entretien avec Yannick Haenel: Précisions sur Jan Karski’, Mémoires occupées: Fictions françaises et Seconde Guerre mondiale, ed. by Marc Dambre (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2013), 233-47 (p. 235). 2 This is how Karski has often been referred to since the publication of E. Thomas Wood’s and Stanisław M. Jankowski’s authorised biography, Karski: How One Man Who Tried to Stop the Holocaust (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994). 2 traumatic visits to the ghetto and the camp he infiltrated on their recommendation. Part II then summarizes the Polish courier’s own memoirs, Story of the Secret State (1944), which relate Karski’s work for the Polish resistance and his diplomatic missions to London and Washington. Much longer than Parts I and II and strikingly different in tone, Part III concentrates on the Polish hero’s postwar life in America and is narrated by an imaginary Jan Karski who is speaking to us from beyond the grave. As if trying to forestall any misunderstandings or criticism provoked by this daring mix of fact and fiction, in the author’s note Haenel scrupulously distinguishes between the first two parts, which are documentary, and Part III that is fictional.3 It seems that by staging a highly positive hero, whose commitment to the Jewish cause has been officially acknowledged by both Israel and America, 4 and by displaying a truly reverential attitude towards his courageous and righteous protagonist, Haenel should have been spared the sort of criticism that Jonathan Littell faced on publishing Les Bienveillantes four years earlier. Indeed, having been awarded two important French literary prizes,5 Jan Karski became an overnight critical and commercial success, and earned its hitherto relatively unknown author many honours.6 In this context, the accusations that Claude Lanzmann levelled at Haenel in January 2010 came as a surprise; the author of Shoah criticised the novelist for having plagiarised his documentary and, worse still, for having written a ‘false novel’ and falsified history, as well as for lacking imagination and talent. Lanzmann also claimed that Haenel had misrepresented Karski by showing him in a simplistic way as a ‘pleurnichard et véhément procureur qui met le monde entier en accusation pour n’avoir pas sauvé les Juifs’.7 Around the same time, prominent Holocaust historian, Annette Wieviorka, launched her crusade against Haenel’s book, calling it a ‘false testimony’ and thus implicitly equating it with Jerzy Kosiński’s or Binjamin Wilkomirski’s faked accounts of their 3 In interviews Haenel redefined the third past as ‘fiction intuitive’ and highlighted the fictionality of Parts I and II. This is because these offer a subjective representation of the documentary texts that in themselves are partial in both senses of the word. See ‘Entretien avec Yannick Haenel’, 237. 4 In 1982, Yad Vashem recognised Karski as Righteous Among the Nations, in 1994 he was made an honorary citizen of Israel, and in 2012 Barack Obama awarded Karski the Presidential Medal for Freedom. 5 The Prix Interallié and Prix du roman FNAC. 6 Haenel was made Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and received the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. 7 Claude Lanzmann, ‘Jan Karski de Yannick Haenel: un faux roman’, Les Temps modernes 657 (January-March 2010), online. 3 childhood survival of the Holocaust. 8 Wieviorka also condemned the anachronism of Haenel’s conception of World War II politics consisting in the book’s resolute anti-American stance. Finally, she took exception to Haenel’s alleged relativisation of Polish anti-Semitism and, agreeing with Lanzmann, reproached him for having taken inadmissible liberties with historical truth, which the novelist reportedly replaced with ‘un certain nombre de ‘vérités’ qui sont les siennes dans une totale désinvolture à l’égard de l’histoire’.9 It is noteworthy that the afore-cited accusations were quickly taken up and repeated in Karski’s homeland, a fact that seems puzzling given Haenel’s adulatory attitude towards the Polish hero and his romanticised image of Poland itself.10 The debate then moved from the pages of newspapers and magazines to scholarly journals where, once again, Haenel found his supporters and detractors. 11 Rather than trying to re-evaluate the novel’s historical veracity or further discuss the ethics of its marriage of fact and fiction but nevertheless polemicising with certain points of 8 Published in 1965 as an autobiographical novel, Kosinski’s The Painted Bird was later denounced as fiction. See Eliot Weinberger, Karmic Traces 1993–1995 (New York: New Directions, 2000), 56. Likewise, Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood were exposed as a fake and its author as an impostor. See, for example, Andrea Reiter, ‘Memory and Authenticity: The Case of Binjamin Wilkomirski’, The Memory of Catastrophe, ed. by Peter Grey and Kendrick Oliver (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 132-45. 9 Annette Wieviorka, ‘Karski témoigne: La réponse d’Annette Wieviorka’, L’Histoire 379 (March 2014), online. For more details on the acrimonious exchanges between Haenel and his critics, see Richard J. Golsan, ‘L’“Affaire Jan Karski”: Réflexions sur un scandale littéraire et historique’, Mémoires occupées, pp. 183-90. 10 Among the critics who reacted to Jan Karski were the journalist Leopold Unger, the President of the Jan Karski Society, Kazimierz Pawełek, and a score of prominent journalists such as Aleksandra Klich or Jarosław Kurski. See, for example, Leopold Unger, ‘On ne touche pas à Jan Karski’, Courrier international, 15.02.2010, online; Aleksandra Klich, ‘Ksero z życia Karskiego’ [‘A Photocopy of Karski’s Life’], Gazeta Wyborcza, 28.09.2010, online; Jarosław Kurski, ‘Karykatury Jana Karskiego’ [‘Caricatures of Jan Karski’], Gazeta Wyborcza, 22.03.2010, online; Kazimierz Pawełek, ‘Karski n’a jamais soupçonné les États-Unis de trahison’, Le Point, 04.02.2010. 11 Among Haenel’s most severe critics is Golsan who has endorsed Lanzmann’s and Wieviorka’s judgment of the novel, adding further arguments against Haenel’s writing. He described Jan Karski as a novel where ‘distortion bleeds into scandalous revisionism’ and its protagonist as ‘a problematic and dubious witness’, as well as ‘a falsifier of history’. See Richard J. Golsan, ‘The Poetics and Perils of Faction: Contemporary French Fiction and the Memory of World War II’, The Romanic Review 105.1- 2 (2014), 53–68 (p. 63 and p. 65). More positive have been Philippe Carrard, Manuel Braganca, Pavel Hladki, and Evelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand. See Philippe Carrard, ‘Historiographic Metafiction, French Style’, Style 48.2 (Summer 2014), 181-202, Manuel Braganca, ‘Faire parler les morts: Sur Jan Karski et la controverse Lanzmann-Haenel’, Modern and Contemporary France 23.1 (2015), 35-46, Pawel Hladki, ‘“Qui témoigne pour le témoin?” Question de la liberté littéraire à l’exemple de Jan Karski de Yannick Haenel’, Études romanes de Brno 33.1 (2012), 57-67, Evelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand, ‘Les restes d’Auschwitz: Intertextualité et postmémoire dans Jan Karski de Yannick Haenel et C’est maintenant du passé de Marianne Rubinstein’, Études françaises 49.2 (2013), 14562, and ‘Emprunt et bricolage: Traces mémorielles de la Shoah dans Drancy Avenir et Jan Karski’, French Forum 39.1 (Winter 2014), 143-57.
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